Femininity (3 page)

An explanation for why girls mature more rapidly than boys, and why they stop growing
in skeletal size after menstruation begins, may be rooted in our primitive past when
life expectancy was low and a female needed to get on with the important job of reproduction
as quickly as possible. Obviously, the sooner she reached puberty the better—no such
biological urgency would attend the male rate of maturation. Once she started to bear
offspring it would be biologically unsound if a mother herself were still growing.
A developing fetus and a suckling infant require enormous amounts of protein, calcium
and other essential minerals, and these life-or-death demands would create a double
strain and a severe nutritional hardship on a body hellbent on its own enlargement.
A mother whose skeletal growth had stopped would stand a better chance of survival,
and so would her baby. In a phenomenon stressed by Ashley Montagu, for the first few
years after the start of menstruation a girl usually is not fertile despite outward
signs. These are her years of minor but continued growth, and infertility seems to
be nature’s way of cutting down on infant and maternal deaths.

Anthropologists view superior size as a reproductive advantage for the male in terms
of competition for access to females. In the popular imagination masculinity always
includes the concepts of powerful and large, while slight and weak are feminine descriptions.
A man-size portion puts more food on the plate and the Man-Size Kleenex packs more
tissues in the box. The average American male measures in at a shade over five feet
nine inches, and the average American female stands at five feet four and a half inches.
If a woman fits neatly into the averages, a few inches shorter than a member of the
opposite sex, she is probably going to feel comfortable about size, sweetly in harmony
with the
proportional esthetics of male-female relations. However, 10 percent of all American
women stand above five feet seven and a half inches, and they hover over that 10 percent
of all American men who are under five feet six inches. (Ten percent of the population
defy the averages for their gender in other signs of dimorphism such as hip girth
and width of the shoulders.) Five percent of the female population, the really tall
women, upset the order of conventional proportion by standing above the mean height
of men.

Most of the gestures of etiquette and the rules of good manners were designed for
a conventional disparity in size and strength. A small man protectively holding an
umbrella for a taller woman looks faintly awkward, and a conventional difference in
size is considered the norm in romantic expectations. The world’s tallest woman has
said she could never fall in love with a shorter man—at seven feet seven inches, alas,
she remains unmarried. Cher is taller than Sonny, but was not in their television
promotions. Only a half-inch shorter than Prince Charles when she wore her flat heels,
Lady Di was reduced in stature by a full head for the postage stamp that commemorated
their royal wedding. “She looked up into his eyes” is more than a breathless phrase
from a Gothic novel; it is an expression of the heterosexual relationship as we expect
to find it. When a woman stands taller than a man she has broken a cardinal feminine
rule, for her physical stature reminds him that he may be too short—inadequate, insufficient—for
the competitive world of men. She has dealt a blow to his masculine image, undermined
his footing as aggressor-protector. To show a man that he may not be needed is a terribly
unfeminine stance, and she knows she will pay for it unless she can compensate in
some other manner.

Even though I’m not quite five feet six inches, a lucky size for feminine appearance,
I usually feel lumbering in relation to a smaller man. The familiar ratios are out
of kilter; the level of eye contact is oddly reversed. Perhaps with an unwitting,
forceful gesture I might accidentally tip him over. I suffer for his shortness and
feel guilty for the unalterable fact of my height. I slouch, I twist, I tilt my head.
I reach into my little bag of feminine tricks, anything to diffuse my apparent solidity,
my relative
strength. Once on a crowded subway car in Tokyo I felt at the outer limits of appropriate
size, in peril of being a rude affront to all Japanese men and a gross insult to their
country’s sense of exquisite proportion. It was hardly my fault that Americans in
general are a taller people, but I did not want to seem un-feminine—outsize, overbearing,
impolite.

America produces some of the tallest women in the world, outranked only by the Swiss,
the Swedish, the Germans and the Norwegians. We’re the same size as many men in southern
Europe, Asia and Latin America. We’re taller than most Vietnamese, Thai and Laotian
soldiers. We’re bigger than the Yanomamo warriors of Brazil, the fierce tribesmen
of New Guinea, the Javanese, the Lapps and the Maya and Quechua Indians. We’re indisputably
larger than Kalahari bushmen, the Pygmies and a few other African tribes. American
women can tower over Yemenite Jews, Siberian natives and entire village populations
in Sardinia and parts of Spain. We’re appreciably taller than most French, Italian
and Spanish women and we’re almost the same height as Polish men. Genetics and nutrition
have given us the edge. More than our supposed independence, brashness or sexual liberation,
sheer size may give us our unshakable reputation for a certain lack of femininity
in comparison to women in other parts of the globe.

The equation of maleness with bigness persists as a dearly loved concept. I’ve heard
“Look at the big males” while viewing an elephant matriarch and her offspring in Kenya,
and “Look at the big male” while sighting a female musk ox and her young in Alaska,
and I’ve gnashed my teeth on both occasions. Authoritative women who correct false
impressions are unfeminine and bossy but it is equally true that amateur observers
of wildlife tend to assume that the largest animal in any grouping must be a male,
and furthermore, that he must be in charge.

Early sexual maturation puts a fast brake on growth in baboon and gorilla females
while males of these species continue to gain in size for several more years. Whiskers,
shaggy manes, long canines and other dimorphic signs that distinguish a male usually
make their appearance during these additional years of growth. Male and female gibbons,
on the other hand, mature at
approximately the same age and can barely be distinguished by size and external appearance.
(A lack of dimorphism is found in 18 percent of all primate species, and interestingly,
these are the species where monogamy prevails.) The poor reputation suffered by hyenas
has much to do with their homeliness and jarring chortles, but it does not help the
hyena’s case that the female is larger than the male (she reaches reproductive maturity
a year later than he does), is dominant to him and has a huge, long clitoris and a
sham scrotal sac. Hyenas were thought to be hermaphroditic, homosexual, orgiastic
and lewd when Horace Walpole called Mary Wollstonecraft “a hyena in petticoats,” slandering
her femininity and the movement for women’s rights in one wicked phrase.

Contemplation of a big female mating with a smaller male is so at odds with our human
perspective and the sort of anthropomorphizing that is found in books for children
that many intelligent people are surprised to hear that in a majority of species,
females do happen to be the larger sex. This is an evolutionary adaptation with probable
reproductive advantage for the American bald eagle, the king crab, the snowy owl,
the gypsy moth, the chinchilla, the garter snake, the python, the right whale, the
humpback whale, the gray whale, the blue whale (thus the largest creature in the world
is female), all families of rabbits and hares, the hawks and the falcons, toads, sharks,
salmon, flounder, most hummingbirds and turtles, and other fish, birds, reptiles,
amphibians and insects too numerous to mention. Admittedly most of these species with
big reproducing females are clustered on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder,
suggesting that Mother Nature had an eventual change of mind or found a more efficient
style of motherhood for her later models, but nevertheless, a correction of the total
picture is an excellent antidote to some common assumptions about bigness and maleness
in all creatures great and small.

But when we return to humans and most other primates, we confront a disparity of size
and strength with serious implications. As expressed by the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy,
“Males are bigger than females and are able to bully them.” Bullying is generally
called “dominance” in primate studies, and for gorillas
and baboons it usually boils down to who gets to sit on a favorite branch or who gets
to eat the available fig. Among humans, quite obviously the stakes are higher. Possibly
one day a scientist will prove that initiative and assertion are not given a boost
by the confidence that comes from superior physical strength, but somehow I doubt
it. Competition among men has a very long history that is marked by physical aggression,
and the inability of most women to compete successfully with men in feats of strength
is based on a biological difference. We can ponder the exceptional ring-tailed lemur
who is smaller than the male yet dominant to him—she remains oblivious to his posturing
displays and cuffs him around when she wants to—yet when push comes to shove, we are
not ring-tailed lemurs.

Yet neither are women as weak, slight or insubstantial as the current esthetic ideal
suggests. Sexual dimorphism may distinguish the male by muscle strength and height,
but femaleness is not the opposite side of the coin. Soft fatty tissue deposited in
sizable masses identifies the female dimorphic state, a biological adaptation to the
pressures of motherhood and survival. A woman’s body typically has a fat content of
25 percent, while 15 percent is normal for males, a difference that is not caused
primarily by exercise or strenuous labor. Millions of years ago when our evolutionary
attributes were established, food resources were probably uncertain and the female
body most likely developed its cushion of subcutaneous fat as a reserve supply of
nutrition. A mighty 80,000 calories sustains a pregnancy to term, and body fat is
utilized in the production of milk. Dr. Rose Frisch of Harvard has theorized that
a critical level of adipose flesh is needed to kick off and maintain the cycle of
ovulation. Anorectics usually cease to menstruate because they have fallen below the
critical level. Professional athletes, too, may temporarily lose their menstrual cycle
in the course of converting their ratio of fat to lean muscle.

Fleshiness, as we know, is problematic to the present-day feminine illusion, for while
fat creates the celebrated dimorphic curves of womanhood, it is also the agent of
massiveness and bulk, properties more readily associated with masculine solidity and
power. What seems to be a natural tendency of the female
body to acquire substantial, if wobbly, mass runs counter to the preferred ideal of
delicate shapeliness. Furthermore, breasts, hips, stomach and thighs, the familiar
places where fat cells collect, do not necessarily expand in uniform proportion; genetic
differences among women are rife. Yet nearly every civilization has sought to impose
a uniform shape upon the female body, a feminine esthetic that usually denies solidity
by rearranging, accentuating or drastically reducing some portion of the female anatomy
or some natural expression of flesh.

In past centuries a woman of status was required to endure some painful device of
immobilization that shortened her breath or shortened her step by tightly constricting
some specific part of her body—waist, abdomen, rib cage, breast, neck or foot—in the
belief that she was improving, supporting or enhancing an esthetically imperfect,
grossly shapeless natural figure. In the East she was subject to the Japanese obi,
the Burmese neck ring and the Chinese bound foot; in the West she wore the steel-ribbed
corset and whalebone stays. Each device of beautification restricted her freedom and
weakened her strength; each provided a feminine obstacle course through which she
endeavored to move with artificial grace. Each instrument of discomfort was believed
by her to be a superior emblem of her privileged position and a moral requisite for
correct behavior, and each ingenious constriction was sentimentalized by men as erotic
in its own right, apart from the woman it was designed to improve.

Bernard Rudofsky, a provocative social critic, has theorized that men find deep sexual
excitement in the hobbling of women. Such a statement is darkly inflammatory but impossible
to dismiss. To envision a Chinese nobleman’s wife or courtesan with daintily slippered
three-inch stubs in place of normal feet is to understand much about man’s violent
subjugation of women; what is less clear is the concept of exquisite feminine beauty
contained within the deforming violence: the sensuous incapacitation and useless,
ornamental charm perceived in the fused, misshapen bones. A lotus blossom with a willow
walk: romantic imagery for man’s improvement over nature. Pruned from childhood, her
tiny foot was said to resemble the lotus, a most revered flower, and with the support
of a long staff or leaning against a
husband or servant, she walked like a whisper of wind through the willows, swaying
tremulously with each timid step. Making love to the lotus foot, an elaborate art
of manipulation, postures and poses, was a dominant theme in Chinese pornography for
eight hundred years while the custom of footbinding flourished.

Distasteful though it may be, the bound foot illustrates several aspects of the feminine
esthetic. It originated in the rarefied atmosphere of a decadent upper class where
the physical labor of women was not required, and it became an enviable symbol of
luxury, leisure and refinement. It isolated a specific part of the female body which
differed from the male body in some respect, in this case a slightly smaller foot,
and cruelly exaggerated the natural difference in the cause of artistic perfection.
It imposed an ingenious handicap upon a routine, functional act and reduced the female’s
competence to deal with the world around her, rendering that world a more perilous
place and the imbalanced woman a more dependent, fearful creature. It rendered a man
more competent and steady—in other words, more masculine—by simple contrast. It romanticized,
and thereby justified, the woman’s tottering gait by turning it into a sexual attraction,
and it elevated her “perfected” part, her tiny, useless foot, to the realm of ornamental
beauty. It instilled in every woman a deep sense of insecurity born of the conviction
that some natural part of her was profoundly ugly (in China the common term was “goosefoot”)
and required some extreme corrective measure. And finally, it demanded the shared
complicity of mother and daughter in the desperate work of beautification and the
passing on of compliant, submissive feminine values, for the anxious mother was the
agent of will who crushed her suffering daughter’s foot as she calmed her rebellion
by holding up the promise of the dainty shoe, teaching her child at an early age that
the feminine mission in life, at the cost of tears and pain, was to alter her body
and amend her ways in the supreme effort to attract and please a man.